


yes is yes is yes

by nicasio_silang



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Trueform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-09
Updated: 2012-05-09
Packaged: 2017-11-05 01:09:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/400789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nicasio_silang/pseuds/nicasio_silang
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She is a small human being up in a tree.</p>
            </blockquote>





	yes is yes is yes

Six years old and Claire is laughing. Thanksgiving and all the kids from every house are in the street where there's the finest film of snow, where it's being elided and greyed by their galoshes. Claire jogs past Marjorie and Bradley who are enticing everyone to their backyard for sledding that will never work, it's just not slick enough anywhere. Claire runs four blocks to the chain-link-fenced field where the grass is high almost as her head, and the lock is the size of both her fists. She laughs and says _Castiel, come on._

He is there like he's always there, a part of the November mid-afternoon, silvered and limpidly light as the clouds in the sky, sharp like the crisp breeze blushing her cheeks, present as the leaf that catches in-between the pleats of the braid of her hair. 

When she reaches the gate, the lock is hanging open. Claire smiles. She ducks her head. _It's safe,_ he tells her. _I've made sure of that._ She opens it just wide enough to slip through.

Her coat is red, bright red, redder than her lips, than her cheeks, redder than the sight behind her eyes when she shuts them hard enough to check that he's still nearby. It collects droplets and spent seed husks as she zigs, she zags into the field. She's never been inside it before. Bradley climbed the fence three weeks ago, but he just stood on the other side, he didn't go out of sight. Eventually he sat down and waited for his brother to find him. But Claire, Claire isn't alone. Castiel says, _This way_. Castiel says, _Yes, this way_. And she knows where they're going.

The tips of the grass touch the trailing edge of her eyelashes so that drops of water sparkle down along them and onto her face, right down her cheek. 

_Cas_ , she says. _Stop messing around._ The wind sighs right above her head.

There is one tree in the field. You can only see the top of it from the street outside. Claire comes upon it like an unexpected cabin in the woods in a story. Although Castiel scolds her, _This is just a tree_ , he also says, _Would you like to climb it? We can see the roof of your garage from up there._

When you're six years old and live in Pontiac, Illinois, seeing the roof of your garage from a vantage point in the lower branches of a tree in an abandoned field is as exciting as the first grade ever gets.

Claire is careful. She wraps her hands around every branch, every round nook, before placing her weight there. The tree has no leaves left. It is mottled and blackening in the shape of the penciled outline of a brussels sprout. Soon enough she is above the grass, and then among the arms, and she has found a spot to perch. She divides her feet between two branches, and her front is leaned up against the trunk. She is a small human being up in a tree. 

_Is this good?_ Castiel inquires. She doles out a smile for him and nods in the direction of her family's garage. 

She is very high up. She can see over the grass and over the fence, into six different back yards. She can see a man standing at a window inside a house she's never noticed. He is looking at his hands that rest on the sill. She can see the spire of a far-away church, one she's never been to. She can see three ravens on a roof. 

_This isn't bad_ , she thinks. 

_There's more,_ he says. _Do you trust me? Claire, do you trust me with your very blood?_

Claire does. She lets go with her arms and crashes back to the ground. The grass catches her softly. 

_Of course, of course!_ She says. _Let's run as fast as we can!_ And she's off.


End file.
